Simone de Beauvoir Quotes
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The innumerable conflicts that set men and women against one another come from the fact that neither is prepared to assume all the consequences of this situation which the one has offered and the other accepted.
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It is true that nothing is gained without something being lost: everyone knows that in fulfilling oneself one necessarily sacrifices some possibilities.
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Every war, every revolution, demands the sacrifice of a generation, of a collectivity, by those who undertake it.
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To create a language all of a piece which would be a women's language, that I find quite insane. There does not exist a mathematics which is only a women's mathematics, or a feminine science.
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To be free is not to have the power to do anything you like; it is to be able to surpass the given toward an open future.
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All the opportunities you let slip by! The idea, the inspiration just doesn´t come fast enough. Instead of being open, you´re closed up tight. That´s the worst sin of all - the sin of omission.
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A couple who go on living together merely because that was how they began, without any other reason: was that what we were turning into?
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There you are. The sight of the changing world is miraculous and heartbreaking, both at the same time. --But so it is for me too. The heartbreaking side of growing old is not in the things around one but in oneself.
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The writer can't stop her unconscious from showing up, that's certain.
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I realized that even if we went on talking till Judgment Day, I would still find the time all too short.
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We belong to this earth. Now I can see the truth ... I love you on this earth of ours. Love me, do!
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There's something tragic about you. Your feeling for the absolute. You were made to believe in God and spend your life in a convent.' There are too many with that vocation. God would have had to love only me.
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I tore myself away from the safe comfort of certainties through my love for truth – and truth rewarded me.
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The most mediocre of males feels himself a demigod as compared with women.
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There is a poetry in making preserves; the housewife has caught duration in the snare of sugar, she has enclosed life in jars.
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There is only one good. And that is to act according to the dictates of one's conscience.
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The father's life is surrounded by mysterious prestige: the hours he spends in the home, the room where he works, the objects around him, his occupations, his habits, have a sacred character. It is he who feeds the family, is the one in charge and the head. Usually he works outside the home, and it is through him that the household communicates with the rest of the world: he is the embodiment of this adventurous, immense, difficult, and marvelous world; he is transcendence, he is God.
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Old age was growing inside me. It kept catching my eye from the depths of the mirror. I was paralyzed sometimes as I saw it making its way toward me so steadily when nothing inside me was ready for it.
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Insects were scurrying about in the shade cast by the grass, and the lawn was a huge monotonous forest of thousands of little green blades, all equal, all alike, hiding the world from each other. Anguished, she thought, "I don't want to be just another blade of grass."
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Let women be provided with living strength of their own.
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Living by proxy is always a precarious expedient.
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Tonight, once more, life sinks its teeth into my heart.
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Anais Nin shows an occasional grace in writing, but her work is quite foreign to me, precisely because she wants so much to be feminine and not feminist. And then she is so gaga before so many men. She talks about men I know in France, men who were less than nothing, and she considers them kings, extraordinary people.
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The characteristic feature of all ethics is to consider human life as a game that can be won or lost and to teach man the means of winning.